
Town + Country: Narratives of Property and Capital troubles the enduring narrative binary of town and country. Borders between these two terrains have always morphed and slipped around each other theoretically, politically, economically and socially, yet the narrative of the urban/rural divide persists. Indigenous land dispossession and reclamation, capital accumulation in the form of real-estate assets, labour and technological development are all obscured by this persistent fiction. Town and country narratives similarly obscure questions of class, freedom of movement and resource extraction.
This group exhibition focuses on histories and practices in so-called British Columbia, and approaches the political, economic and representational systems at play in our long-mythologized conceptions of this binary of place, through the work of contemporary artists. These include Architects Against Housing Alienation, Rodney Graham, Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill, Karin Jones, Tiziana La Melia, Carel Moiseiwitsch, Alex Morrison, Debra, Aleen and Isaiah Sparrow, Janet Wang, Holly Ward, Tania Willard and Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun.